Contents

The Idea

Evatar114 got the idea when she read Star Trek: Into the Inferno, another crossover. She thought of characters that would be compatible with Aang's world, and came up with Todd Hewitt and Viola Eade from Chaos Walking. The basic storyline is pretty close between the original series and the first book. Also, many of the characters and themes are similar.

Events Leading Up to Choices

World of Avatar

After the war ended, Zuko and Mai went back to the Fire Nation to help rebuild their relationships with the other nations. They also got married and Mai is pregnant with their first child. Iroh became sick and came back to live in the Fire Nation Capital for a while. Sokka and Suki went to Kyoshi Island to start a school where all warriors of all genders, nations, and age could gather together to learn, practice and teach. Aang, Toph, and Katara started to travel around the world, helping anyone they came across and looking for airbenders that might have survived the genocide.

New World

See the Synopsis section of TKoNLG

Basis of TKoNLG

(That's The Knife of Never Letting Go. It's a pain to type it all out.)

Noise

A VERY important element of the story is the presence of Noise. Noise is basically all of your thoughts (i.e., words, pictures, videos) broadcasted to the entire world. Everything can hear it, but strangely human females are the only things that are silent.

History of New World and its Settlers

New World is a planet similar to Old World/Earth. It has lots of fertile farmland, with an ocean and at least one river. The natives of New World are Spackle (the name comes from the only written language that the settlers could find. Es' Paquli supposedly means "the people".). They have adapted to the Noise and to swamp living. It takes about 67 years to get there by spaceship. During that time, the settlers are frozen except for the caretaker families who keep things running on the ship (This was Viola's parents job).

The people of New World are Christian settlers from Old World. They came from Old World to set up their own little utopia. They have technology that mostly involves fisson (like fission generators, cars, and bikes), but not much else. Lots of settlers are just farmers, so they have no need for it. Viola and the new settlers have better technology, like fireboxes, special synthetic bandages, and binoculars that can see over very long distances and in the dark. Almost all the people of New World have an accent.

The Noise germ drove a bunch of people insane. The settlers fled from Haven as fast as roads could be cut. Looking for a scapegoat, a preaching spread throughout the World: They blamed the aliens. A preaching became a movement, and a movement became a war. The humans had guns and the Spackle didn't, so the war was a decisive victory for the settlers. The Spackle learned to stay away from humans, and the settlers were free to go insane on their own. But in some places the war didn't stop with the Spackle. In New Elizabeth, the settlement farthest away from Haven, influenced by Aaron and driven to it by Mayor Prentiss, the men in New Elizabeth killed all the women of the town, thinking that what was hidden must be evil. New Elizabeth became Prentisstown. When the rest of New World heard about the crimes in Prentisstown, a law was passed that said if any man crossed the swamp, he would be executed. The Mayor then said if anyone tried to run away, "he would go and track them down hisself". So the town was sentenced to a slow death in exile. When the boys of Prentisstown turned 13, they were told a version of the truth, and then they were made complicit themselves. So when you turned thirteen in Prentisstown, you'd have to kill a man to become a man.

It's sickening, ain't it?

Synopsis

(This is a censored summary where I tried not to give away much of the book. If you want a full summary of the series and of TKoNLG, click here)

TKoNLG is about the main characters, Todd Hewitt and Viola Eade (and Manchee, Todd's talking dog, who is awesome), trying to stop an army from conquering all of New World, all while being chased by this army, and a crazy priest, Aaron.

The story starts when Todd and Manchee come across an area of silence in a swamp. According to what they know, this is impossible, so Todd and Manchee run back to their farm. Todd's guardians, Ben and Cillian, tell him that he needs to leave Prentisstown right away. After the farm's attacked by the Mayor's men, Todd and Manchee run back to the swamp, where the town's (crazy) preacher, Aaron is waiting. Todd evades Aaron, and comes across the silence again. When he confronts it with Manchee, he finds a girl cowering by a tree. He tries to help her, but she can't or won't speak. Aaron comes in again, and after a brief struggle, the trio leaves him for dead in a puddle of water as they continue going through the swamp. The girl brings Todd to the wreckage of her ship, where he comes to the conclusion that she's a new settler from Old World. They continue walking through the swamp, until Todd realizes that the Noise germ will kill her (according to what he knows, the Noise was a germ that was released by the Spackle during the war. It supposedly killed all the women in Prentisstown and half the men too. But we know better...). But just because he can't hear her doesn't mean that she can't hear him. The girl panics and runs back into the swamp. Todd gets ready to leave her behind because he can't convince her to come with her. But when Todd looks behind them with these cool binoculars that Viola brought, and he sees the Mayor himself coming on horseback with some other men, and Aaron, who didn't die after all. Todd panics and he and the girl start to sprint for a bridge that they burn down so the Mayor can't follow them. After this, the girl finally speaks, and says her name's Viola. The guardian of the bridge, Hildy, gets mad about her bridge being burned down, but she turns out to be friendly, and shows them to the town (called Farbranch) the next day. The people of Farbranch are mostly welcoming, but a couple people are hostile towards Todd. One guy, Matthew Lyle, attacks Todd later, but he incapitates Matthew before any serious damage is done. But while this is happening, the town is attacked by all of Prentisstown. Todd, Viola, and Manchee run away from Farbranch and continue making their way to Haven, the largest town on New World, hoping that they have enough people to withstand the army.

(I'm not going to go into the details about what they do while they're traveling to Haven unless something important happens. You'll just have to read the book yourself.)

While traveling to Haven, they meet Wilf, a sea of Things, and the Mayor's son, who's a giant jerk. After this meeting that tragically (not)ends with the jerk being electrocuted (but sadly, not fatally), Todd and Viola realize the reason that the army's chasing them so much: Todd's the one who doesn't fit (Todd can't and refuses to kill), and the army wants to make him a killer. If the Mayor succeeds, then he's made a perfect army with no weak links (everyone complicit, everyone equal, everyone guilty).

After figuring this out, Todd and Viola come across a Spackle making camp for the night. Todd's still mad about the fight and being called a coward, so to prove himself, he kills the Spackle. After realizing what he's done, Todd becomes overcome with guilt, and doesn't realize that Aaron has been watching the whole time. Seizing his chance, Aaron kidnaps Viola and stabs Todd with his own knife.

Todd wakes up, not dead, because his mother's diary stopped the knife from going all the way through his back. He manages to pull the knife out, puts these special (futuristic) bandages on and then he goes after Aaron and Viola with Manchee.

(Again, I will not go into details. READ THE BOOK.)

Todd starts to get really sick, and he comes across Wilf and his crazy wife Jane. He also starts to have wild hallucinations, mostly pertaining to Aaron, Viola, and his guilt over killing the Spackle. After a while, they catch up to the real Aaron and Viola. Todd manages to come up with a plan to save Viola, and it works. But in the process, Manchee's killed by Aaron after he rips his nose off.

(This is not a complete synopsis. My story starts here, and I see no reason to continue. If you want to know what happens, READ THE BOOK! I highly recommend it to anyone, even if I don't really know you.)

Writing Style of the TKoNLG

TKoNLG has a very unique writing style. There's broken sentences, thoughts in parentheses, purposeful misspellings to make it sound like people have accents, and run-on sentences that go on for paragraphs. The author utilizes this writing style in Choices after the second chapter (She read The Ask and the Answer again and realized that both Viola and Todd do this when in first person, so it's not just some weird Todd thing).